The Vacant Museum aims to promote the work of emerging and underrepresented artists, facilitate discussion of pressing contemporary matters, and redefine traditional notions of the gallery and exhibition space.
If you were to look for the Vacant Museum on a map you would not find it. Its location does not abide by the rules of compasses or longitude and latitude.
To put it simply, the Vacant Museum is not your typical museum. With no walls to hang the works of great artists, no floors for shuffling and standing, and no ceiling for which to contain the energy generated by great minds contemplating and admiring, the Vacant Museum instead preserves its art in a plane of space known as the internet. While this may seem to counter traditional understandings and methodologies of the art world, reinventing the gallery and museum space is not at all unusual. As John Berger once wrote, “the visual arts have always existed within a certain preserve; originally this preserve was magical or sacred. But it was also physical: it was the place, the cave, the building, in which, or for which, the work was made… Later the preserve of art became a social one. It entered the culture of the ruling class, whilst physically it was set apart and isolated in their palaces and houses. During all this history the authority of art was inseparable from the particular authority of the preserve.”
So what happens now that the preserve can be non-physical? What authority belongs to a digital field occupied by thousands of people and at the same time by no one at all? What authority does a painting or sculpture have after it’s been reproduced and digitized and then translated into pixels and gigabytes?
It was from these questions that the concept for the Vacant Museum was formed. We are attempting to make sense of these changes in audience and artist interaction and viewer participation. If the internet has become a new art preserve, then its doors are wide open and ready for the Ruskins, Benjamins, and Rauncières of the twenty-first century to state their peace.
